To Tony Gwynn, the overriding attitude was less Chicken Little and more Dr. Strangelove. It was time to stop worrying and love the bomb. In a literal sense, baseball found out something about itself. If giving away more free stuff on promotion day and having the players sign autographs after the game were nice touches in the wake of the strike, what - really brought the public back was the action on the field, and the ball clearing the fence.
CHAPTER FIVE
Inside the clubhouse at Jack Murphy Stadium, home of the San Diego Padres, baseball’s transformation was on subtle display. The main room that housed the player lockers was expansive. Clubhouse attendants sat on the floor, Indian-style, scrubbing caked mud from the spikes of a dozen baseball shoes. Clean uniforms hung in stalls in mundane succession—home jersey, home pants, away jersey, alternate jersey—and dirty ones clumped into shopping carts located around the room like floating, rectangular basketball hoops on wheels. The feel was timeless, juvenile, - everyday baseball, no different for Tony Gwynn than for Mays, Mantle, or Gehrig.
The difference lay in the kitchen, where next to the peanut butter sat a one-gallon jar of protein powder. Beside the jelly was a blender. Near the boxes of bubble gum, candy, and sunflower seeds were gelatin capsules and powder packets, homeopathic methods of regeneration, such as Echinacea, antioxidants, muscle relaxers, amino acids, and ginseng. There even was an herbal supplement for jet lag.
The difference wasn’t in when the players entered the clubhouse, where they watched television, did crossword puzzles, and played cards, but where they retreated to, en masse, before and after games. They headed to the weight room. Chests bulging, the Padres looked like an army, with a swagger traditionally foreign to baseball players. On the road, the Padres were a force, taking over the home club’s weight room. Spot. Lift. Clean. Jerk. Repeat. Once, in Philadelphia during a rain delay, some Phillies grumbled that they couldn’t even use their own facilities. “It’s like the whole team’s in there,” said Philly catcher Mike Lieberthal. During a hot stretch early in the 1996 season, when the Padres won twenty-two of thirty-five, leaped from third place to first, and took on the look of a champion, the players printed T-shirts celebrating their newfound muscularity. The shirts read, “Who cares if you can hit .300 when you can bench 300?”
For the Padres, those were the good times. Nineteen ninety-six was not just the year of Mark McGwire’s 52 bombs, Brady Anderson’s starburst, or the return of the Yankees, who won their first World Championship in eighteen years. It was the year the San Diego Padres grew up. Distant cousins in reputation, prestige, and influence to the rival Dodgers and Giants, the moribund Padres had seemed destined to be third in that trio ever since their inception in 1969. The Dodgers were Robinson and Koufax, the Giants, McGraw and Mays. The Padres were Randy and Ruppert Jones. They wore those silly brown and yellow double-knit uniforms, designed by McDonald’s hamburger magnate Ray Kroc to make his baseball team simpatico with a Quarter Pounder. The Padres had been to the playoffs just once, in 1984, when they lost to a dominating Tigers team in the World Series. Still, San Diego had earned a reputation as a great place to play baseball, not for the quality of play on the field, but for the beautiful weather, beautiful women, and easy, nonaggressive fans. No one, not the fans, the ownership, or even the players, took losing too hard.
In the spring of 1997, the energy was different. Tom Werner, destroyed by Kohler and a mutinous fan base after the 1993 fire sale, was gone, replaced by Larry Lucchino, the Camden Yards architect, and John Moores, a billionaire owner determined to make Padres games something more than a cool place to watch the home team get beat every night. A year earlier, San Diego had swept the Dodgers in Los Angeles in the season’s final three games to win the division by one, a sign of big things to come. The Moores/Lucchino vision had finally returned the Padres to the playoffs. Two years later, they would play the Yankees in the World Series. Following Bud Selig’s mantra, the on-field success would eventually translate into a new ballpark. Lucchino knew something about that.
In the spring of 1997, Pete Williams, a reporter for USA Today Baseball Weekly, went to check on the defending National League West champs. There, the sinews of the new baseball were on display:
Ken Caminiti calls it his goody bag. The black and green duffel accompanies him on every road trip, along with his bats and the black mitt that helped him win his second Gold Glove last season.
“I take it everywhere,” the San Diego Padres third baseman says, pulling it out of his locker stall before a game in Atlanta recently. “It’s part of my routine.”
Caminiti unzips the bag and reveals bottles and zip-locked bags of pills, vitamins and nutritional supplements. He opens one packet and shoves a handful of capsules into his mouth viking-style, all but swallowing the plastic.
After a cup of water and some hard gulping, the pregame routine is complete. There is a separate packet for bedtime and one for the morning, all prepared by a personal trainer.
A self-described “conditioning and supplement freak,” Caminiti obsesses about his weightlifting, nutrition and health. That explains the bag. There’s bromelain, an anti-inflammatory for aches and pains. There’s N-acetyl-cysteine, an amino acid that helps in body building and a product called Extreme Measures, a high-protein drink mix. Digging deeper, Caminiti pulls out Cat’s Claw and Echinacea, which both enhance the immune system.
Then there is creatine (pronounced KREE uh teen), a nutritional and body building supplement, used by more than 100 big leaguers who lift weights. Caminiti leaves this alone; he was taking a scheduled week off from the product many in the body-building industry tout as the safe, all-natural, legal alternative to steroids.
At a time when numerous explanations have been offered for the game’s offensive surge in recent years—from juiced balls to the newer ballparks tailor-made for home runs, to the watered-down pitching theory—perhaps we’re missing the obvious reason.
There was a reason why baseball looked and played differently. It was different. The equipment in the weight room didn’t have cobwebs on it anymore. The science lab had found its way to spring training. Babe Ruth ate hot dogs. Joe Torre and Don Baylor preferred steak. Ken Caminiti was taking Cat’s Claw. Noticing the difference, Tony Gwynn, whose game was defined by hitting .300, said, “Sometimes when I walk on the field, I feel like I’m playing the Kansas City Chiefs.”
The Padres embodied the change, but they weren’t the only team muscling up. They weren’t even the first. While the Padres made their run at the ’96 National League West title, introspection was taking place in baseball.
Kansas City pitcher Tim Belcher was the first person to prominently suggest a phenomenon that would define baseball for a decade. “Everybody’s blaming the pitchers,” Belcher said. “It’s smaller strike zones, smaller parks, and steroids. That’s not a good combination.”
It was a jarring revelation. Steroids were nasty business. They came with a heavy degree of notoriety, having been outlawed by the United States Congress in 1990. They also suggested impurity; players turned to drugs beat their opponents and were willing to break the law to do so. Players who used steroids were immediately diminished, privately ridiculed as illegitimate, artificially potent. It was a dialogue in which no one in baseball, or any athletic league, for that matter, cared to indulge.
Unlike other sports, baseball had skillfully avoided the taint of steroids. Football and the Olympic Games had both been burned by drug scandal in the recent past. In 1988, days after winning an Olympic gold medal with a blistering record-setting performance in the one-hundred-meter dash, the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his record and the gold after testing positive for steroids. Johnson’s disgrace provided the impetus for a rejuvenated Olympic antidoping movement. In 1991, Lyle Alzado, once a ferocious NFL defensive lineman, died meekly, ravaged by a brain tumor he was convinced was the by-product of career-long steroid abuse. Steroids had been used in the NFL for decades, forcing the league to adopted
a steroid policy in 1986, but Alzado’s death proved to be the signature tale of caution.
Baseball suffered from no such tragedy. Steroids were not a particularly high priority and the league did not test for them. At the minor league level, each club was responsible for its own testing programs. Yet to longtime baseball men, a certain muscularity seemed to be defining the game. Everybody looked bigger. The ball seemed to travel farther. The numbers rose. Baseball was changing, and in 1996 a collective light went on among the game’s players, coaches, and executives that this was no fluke year, but the beginning of a decade-long transformation. “I hate to stereotype people because they’re big and strong, to say the only reason they got big was through steroids,” Atlanta pitcher John Smoltz said. “But I’m not naïve, either.”
BECAUSE OF its reputation as a skill sport instead of one that relied primarily on brute force, baseball had avoided inclusion in the debate over the dangers of anabolic steroids to both the health of the players and the balance of the sport. To old-time baseball men, there was no place for steroids in the game. Baseball players weren’t football players; they didn’t strive to get big. The game had never adopted the kind of strength and conditioning culture that existed in football, which would make steroids an inevitable option. Joe Torre, who broke into the majors in 1963 with the Milwaukee Braves, recalled that lifting weights was a violation of the baseball code. For decades, coaches had hammered it into every player who tried to strengthen himself through weight training that weights were deadly to hitters. The attitude of the baseball establishment was simple: Hitting wasn’t so much about strength as it was about bat speed and flexibility. Great hitters could adjust not only to the varying speed of pitches, but to their location as well. Power came largely through mechanics and natural strength. Ted Williams was six-three, but weighed just 175 pounds, and he hit 521 home runs. Willie Mays was but five-ten, weighed 185 pounds, and hit 660 homers. Hank Aaron was six feet tall, but his power was in his wrists, not his biceps. Lifting weights made a hitter bulky. A hitter with bulging muscles, or so went the traditional thinking, would be susceptible to hard inside pitches; he would get “tied up,” lacking the quickness to get around on inside fastballs. In this view, the musclebound hitter would be unable to catch up to the high fastball at the letters. As with Aaron, hitting was in the wrists. Torre recalled that, with the exception of a few players who didn’t fear bucking the establishment, such as Cincinnati slugger Ted Kluszewski, the only weights players ever used were wrist weights. Jim Rice, the great Boston slugger, prided himself on his natural strength. Rice always boasted that he never touched a weight in his sixteen-year playing career.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, as players began to care more about weight training, most clubs kept order by threatening to levy fines against players who tried to hit the weights. Weightlifting was against baseball’s culture. There were always strong men in baseball, and some, such as Lance Parrish and Brian Downing in the 1980s, were weightlifters, but they were considered freaks. Baseball, so went the thinking, was not a sport in which steroids or any type of muscle-building supplements could help.
Brady Anderson, however, changed the thinking of many within the game. Like Caminiti and his Padres teammates, Anderson was one of the first players to use creatine, a dietary supplement that had been on the market for years but had been relegated to the fringes of power sports such as weightlifting and football. A chemical produced naturally in small amounts by the body, creatine—which could also be found in foods such as red meat and some fish—helped the muscles recover faster. After DSHEA, Republican senator Orrin Hatch’s gift to the supplement makers who were largely based in his home state of Utah, creatine became one of the cornerstones of what would become a $27-billion dietary supplement industry.
The use of supplements didn’t just change how baseball players trained, it destroyed a century of conventional wisdom that baseball players were, in fact, not athletes at all. All one had to do was look at the expanding waistlines of pitchers such as Fernando Valenzuela and Rick Reuschel. During the 1980s, the comedian David Letterman made a running joke out of portly Atlanta Braves pitcher Terry Forster. Philadelphia Phillies first baseman John Kruk titled his autobiography I Ain’t an Athlete, Lady. Not only did some players not appear to be in the shape worthy of a world-class athlete, but baseball was the only sport in which a player could actually eat while playing the game. Fielders, hitters, and pitchers alike chomped on sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, or tobacco while on the field. Point guards did not run the fast break with a mouthful of chaw.
Donald Fehr understood this bit of folklore, but he wasn’t particularly fond of it. For years, Fehr served on the board of the U.S. Olympic Committee and would ask the country’s best, most sculpted athletes if they believed they could run the hundred-meter dash or the two-hundred-meter hurdles at top efficiency ten or fifteen days in a row. Most of them, Fehr recalled, looked at him dumbfounded. Of course not, they would say. No one could perform at peak level on so many consecutive days. To them the question was ridiculous, but Fehr was making an important point. He reminded them that, for baseball players, it was routine to play as many as three weeks without a day off, even for travel.
Baseball was a grueling game; for years the owners had been asking players for more. There was more travel because of expansion, more night games, more quick turnarounds in which a team would play a day game after one the previous night. Yet, aside from rising salaries, the owners did not give the players anything back in terms of days off or a more lenient travel schedule. The daily rhythm of the sport wore down muscles over time without giving them much chance to recover, making creatine perfect for baseball.
Creatine could be taken in pill or powder form, and both baseball and football players, who were smashed to bits on one Sunday and needed to recuperate quickly for the next while working out and practicing during the week, loved the stuff. Creatine also enabled an athlete to extend his workout, sometimes by as much as 40 percent beyond his natural limits, and because it allowed a player to work out harder and longer, it also enabled that player to grow stronger. To many strength coaches, creatine was a necessity.
Another thing that made creatine ideal for baseball was its ability to enhance adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, a molecule produced by the body that is responsible for quickness, for a player’s ability to go from inaction to action. That burst was crucial in baseball. It allowed a player to push off and explode toward second to steal a base, or to get a quicker jump on a fly ball or a line drive through the infield. Creatine’s ATP-ENHANCING qualities didn’t help basketball or hockey players much; athletes in those sports were constantly in motion. Baseball was all about starts and stops. There would be little action, then suddenly a center fielder would have to be running at full speed. An extra jolt from creatine had much value to a ballplayer standing around, waiting for something to happen. Most significantly, ATP was responsible for torque, and torque created bat speed, the key to hitting. Thus, creatine enhanced the two elements critical to a hitter, speed and strength.
WITH THE help of creatine, Brady Anderson’s 1996 season was a year of complete vindication. Anderson led off twelve games with home runs in 1996, another home run record in a year full of them. In addition, he made the All-Star team, led the league in extra-base hits, was third in the league in slugging percentage, and finished in the top ten of the American League MVP voting.
If there was a moment that defined Anderson’s newfound success, it did not come during his miraculous 1996 season but five years earlier, that day back in 1991 when he contemplated playing in Japan before accepting a crushing demotion to Triple-A Rochester. At that moment, he decided he would no longer be the hitter baseball wanted him to be, but the hitter he believed he was. He would swing hard. He would swing for power. His manager in Rochester, Greg Biagini, told him to be a contact hitter who took pitches and hit the ball the other way, as leadoff hitters should. Anderson was no big man, argued Biagini, so it
was essential that he play the little man’s game. His manager wanted him to move runners over, to bunt and sacrifice in a league that increasingly seemed to have little respect for such skills. Hitting all of .203 at the time, Brady Anderson nevertheless decided that if he were to fail, he would do so his way. “I just want one favor from you,” Anderson told Biagini. “I want to hit cleanup. I’m tired of this bunting bull. I’m not doing it anymore.”
His workouts increased. Already well built, Anderson became one of the first leadoff hitters who lifted weights before and after games. Anderson would also lift in the offseason. That type of approach with the weights had always been discouraged for baseball players in general, but in recent years had been grudgingly accepted for cleanup hitters. The results were revealing. Having never hit higher than .231 in the majors, Anderson returned to the Orioles in 1992 and raised his batting average by forty points over the previous season. He scored 100 runs for the first time in his career and hit 21 home runs despite having hit just 10 homers over four previous seasons. He also struck out 98 times, a remarkable figure for a leadoff hitter. The next year, he struck out 99 times.
Bob Watson, who in 1996 was the general manager of the New York Yankees, was taken by Brady Anderson’s year, and viewed the accomplishment with equal parts awe and skepticism. Watson had played nineteen seasons in the majors and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He had been a hitting coach in the big leagues, but had never seen a leadoff hitter attack the baseball so violently, as if he were a power hitter. In 1982, Rickey Henderson struck out 94 times while leading off for Oakland, but he also walked 116 times and broke Lou Brock’s single-season stolen-base record by swiping 130 bags. Henderson hit for power, but always had a keen batting eye, and by the time he reached his prime, he had reduced his strikeout totals considerably. Anderson’s only true precursor was Bobby Bonds, who combined 30-home-run power with record-setting strikeout totals as the Giants’ leadoff hitter in the early ’70s. But Bonds was a man before his time. In 1970, when Bonds struck out a record 189 times, baseball was not ready for a high-strikeout, high-power man at the top of the lineup, despite Bonds’s protestation, “I’m going to make 250 outs a year. How I do it is my business.”
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